Board President Michael Faccinetto drafted a list of what district officials consider six alarming developments under the tenure of Secretary of Education Ron Tomalis.

"The rules have been changed, obviously not in the way they should be," Faccinetto said tonight.

The board is holding off on formalizing its objections, preferring to rally other Lehigh Valley districts to its cause and reach out to state legislators. The board plans to revisit the measure in January and likely vote on a resolution blasting Tomalis and the department.

"My concern is we do this (alone) and it puts a target on the district," Faccinetto said.

Children who attend those schools and meet certain criteria may apply for scholarships so they can leave their home school. The state has since apologized to Bethlehem for the erroneous cheating accusation.

The Bethlehem board is perplexed that Tomalis and the department ignored its own Pennsylvania Value-Added Assessment System when drafting a list of low-performing schools. Schools that landed on the list of low-performing were among the bottom 15 percent based on math and reading scores from last year’s state standardized tests.

The assessment system is a statistical analysis of PSSA scores that measures student growth year to year. The growth model is a way a school can make adequate yearly progress when it hasn't met proficiency targets.

Charter schools are now being treated as "local education agencies," meaning they're subject to the same AYP grading standard to which public school districts are held. For an individual school to make AYP, the overall student body must score proficient or above on math and reading tests. And in schools with certain demographics, of 40 or more students, if one group misses one target the entire school doesn’t make AYP.

School districts and charters are measured by grade span, 3-5; 6-8 and 9-12, and only one of the spans must hit testing targets for a district to make AYP and meet attendance and, with a high school, graduation requirements.

Tomalis also changed how the Act 1 index cap on annual property tax hikes is calculated resulting in a 0.5 percentage point decrease in the amount of taxes school districts will be able to levy in 2013-14. The change comes at a time districts are seeing their mandated pension contribution costs jump from 8.65 percent to 12.36 percent.